Posts tagged "Marcel Duchamp"

As we are sliding into a new year, I’ve been thinking lately of my father’s birth, 100 years ago on January 14th, 1913, the first of four sons born to parents who had recently emigrated from Smolensk, now part of Russia. He was born in Brooklyn, probably above, behind or inside a laundry that his parents would have owned. 1913, the year of his birth… How was he to know… How was anyone to know, that at the time of his birth, a movement in arts, culture and technology was forming that was to have a major impact on changing how he, his children and his children’s children would think and live and what they would see and hear?

In 1913, the time of my father’s birth was also the birth or at least the formative years of Modernism. Trains and cars, streetcars and factories created a cacophony of sounds, a seemingly anarchistic collage of sense impressions and a pace of life faster and less comprehensible than anything anyone had ever before experienced. Ford’s first assembly line began that year. The Armory Show established European impressionism and cubism as the most prescient description of a world of multiple and often conflicting narratives and of a place where one simply refused to ‘stand still’. Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’ demonstrated the effects of film on perception and this painting, of a freely moving nude body, was an empowering challenge to Art’s stationary, gazed upon and posed female nude as well as brusque farewell to the mask of Victorian morality. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring debut provoked boos and battles as the loudness and at times dissonant sounds of the City made their way into concert halls whose patrons wanted to still believe that they lived in a world where gentility filled their lives and wallets. But the anarchist-socialist Wobblies knew better and in 1913, built a union and a strike among Patterson , New Jersey Silk workers as their cross industry, cross cultural model shot fear into the ‘late robber barons’ as they joined with the intellectuals and Avante-Garde artists of Mabel Dodge’s 5th Avenue salon to create a pageant that would raise support for the strike and for the then Utopian, eight hour day.

Samuel Levitt, my father, benefiting from a free government funded college and law school education became a lawyer and lived in a world charged by Modernism’s skepticism for the past and confident that change was for the better. As we enter into the Centennial of both my father’s birth and so many defining moments of modernism, it seems increasingly difficult to believe that change is always for the better and now seem perched between the dual themes of our next season’s Action Speaks; the Utopian and Dystopian. However, as we approach the New Year, we feel sure about one thing about our world, articulated so succinctly by the early Modernist philosopher and economist, Karl Marx, ‘All that is solid, melts into air…”

When the Dada artist, Marcel Duchamp, submitted a signed urinal to the Society of Independent Artists, entitled Fountain, in 1917, the work was accepted after much debate over whether or not it was “art.” Although Fountain was hidden from view during the show, it is considered one of the most influential art pieces of the 20th century. How pervasive are the effects today of the piece and of Duchamp himself? Of what scope and relevance is the separation between “high” and “low” art? What role have money and humor played in the art world, historically and contemporaneously?

PANELISTS:

Photo by Viera Levitt

Bert Crenca is the founder and Artistic Director of AS220, a non-profit center for the arts founded in 1985 to provide a local arts forum and home that is unjuried and uncensored. He is a teacher, visual artist, and performing artist with a long academic, exhibition, and performance history. His work is in the permanent collection of both The Museum of Art at Rhode Island School of Design and the Newport Art Museum. In addition he has been a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, The Ford Foundation, Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council among others. In 2003 he was awarded a scholarship to the Strategic Perspectives in Non-Profit Management course at University of Harvard Business School.

Francis Naumann, PH.D. is an independent scholar, curator, and art dealer specializing in art of the Dada and Surrealist periods. He is the author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogues, including New York Dada 1915-1925, considered to be the definitive history of the movement, and has organized exhibitions for the Whitney Museum of American Art, the American Craft Museum in New York, and the Montclair Art Museum among others.

Johanna Ruth Epstein is a Lecturer on Art History and Visual Culture at the Rhode Island School of Design and an Assistant Professor of Art at Hollins University. She is a frequent contributor to ARTnews magazine.

About Action Speaks

Action Speaks is a series of contemporary topic-driven panel discussions centered around “Underappreciated Dates that Changed America.” For 17 years, we have provided a live venue for fellow citizens to engage in thoughtful discussions about history, culture and current events. The panels are hosted by Marc Levitt, recorded, edited and broadcast online and on radio stations around the US.

Markos Moulitsas’ Underappreciated Date

Recorded in Providence, Rhode Island, during Netroots conference in June 2012 by Marc Levitt